Mail Call: How Much Does Direct Mail Cost (2013)

As a business owner, it seems almost impossible to get a straight answer for what direct mail costs. How much does direct Mail Cost?

PriceMatters

Hi Price,

Many vendors do hide the ball when it comes to price, but in all honesty it is a little difficult to answer the question without a little more information on what you want to do. I’ll do my best to answer your question by breaking it down into what you can do with direct mail and where different costs come into play. These prices are not quotes, and only to help you decide whether direct mail is right for you, I tried my best to keep it accurate and in a fair range, these prices are realistic but vary. Prices change and every job is different. To avoid hurt feelings, I’ve rounded up actual prices, these are very realistic.

On most direct mail campaigns, the largest chuck of change is going to be for the postage. Postage could range from 14.9 cents for an Every Door Direct Mail campaign, 28.2 cents for an automated, barcoded, letter sized mailer, and as much as retail postage rates (as of 2013). It’s easy to figure out about where you’re going to fall in price by thinking about your mailing’s recipients and the size of your mail piece. If you’re sending your postcards to a very specific list and the piece qualifies as a letter size or postcard size, you’ll be able to keep the postage under 30 cents per piece when using the appropriate mailing providers. If you want to mail something bigger, like a catalog or a full sheet to that same list, it is no longer qualified as a letter and will be more. If you want to mail that same piece to a more geographically targeted area you may be able to get the price down significantly by drop shipping the mail to the post offices in the area for larger mailings. You may spend a few hundred dollars on drop shipping to save thousands on postage. This also works with EDDM. If you bring the postcards to the post office yourself, it’s 16 cents per oversized postcard. It’s even less when you have them drop shipped on a permit through the business mail procedures, as low as 14.9 cents.

Printing gets the most attention, because that’s where the most flexibility is. You could do a large quantity of postcards and save on the printing per piece, but that might not be viable. A small 4×6 postcard will be cheapest to mail, but is almost always too small for the purposes of highest return on investment. EDDM is bigger cards, so the printing can be a few pennies per piece more, but the postage is so much cheaper, that it’s worth it if you can mail to a general area. Luckily, printing prices for postcard mailers, letters, and Every Door Direct Mail are easy to find out, and are right on our website in the open and easy to find. You’ll also see the prices for mailing services there, which includes the addressing, bundling, and processing the list, removing duplicates and bad addresses, to reduce the amount of non-delivered pieces.

The quick answers are as follows.

Every Door Direct Mail 5000 6.25 x 9, depending on a few factors like location and selected routes, is between 29-31 cents per piece for everything except design, and even lower if you bundle them and bring them to the post office yourself. 10,000 of the same would probably be closer to 28 cents.

A 4×6 mail package for 5000 is probably going to be 32.6 to 33 cents per piece plus design and mailing lists your or a purchased list (6 cents and up for mailing lists depending on what types of factors you want consider). 10,000 of the same would bring it closer to 32.5 cents per piece.

6”x11” are much more visible and going to your targeted mailing or a purchased one list of 5000 would be 40-41 cents per piece. Seems like a bit more than the 4”x6”, but considering that it is much more visible and competitive in the mailbox most people find it’s worth it. 10,000 of the same would be around 39.6 cents per piece.

A letter mailer has a lot more moving parts, but a very basic window envelope and variable letter with a personalized greeting would be around 51 cents per piece for 5,000 and 48 cents for 10,000.

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on Thursday, June 20th, 2013 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Q&A.
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